Be Grateful It's Just...

[Craig Clark]

In response to my 
   > Be grateful it's just a coupla beetles, foax
Steelhead chides me:
> Ah...those couple of beetles just happen to pose a threat to about 250
> million acres of forest in North America. Tallied up in dollars the amount
> is reckoned in the hundreds of billions. The ecological cost? Who knows. If
> this forest goes down, the effect on global warming trends are almost
> incalcuable. Certainly much of Malayasian will end up submergered--but who
> cares, eh? The Third World's revenge? Perhaps. But the developing world's
> forests are being destroyed to bring this about, indigenous people are
> being forcibly relocated, and in many instances killed. The chemical and
> nuclear industries are working hand in hand with the timber companies (as
> any reader of GR's could guess). The chemical companies want to fumigate
> the logs coming from Chile and other places with methyl bromide (one of the
> deadliest chemicals around and an ozone depleter). The nuclear industry
> wants to irradiate the logs with tritium. The pesticide industry says not
> to worry it will develop a global spraying program with organo-phosphate
> pesticides--the chemical descendents of Agent Orange, Sarin and Zyklon-b.

Er, well now, my comments were meant to be read ironically, and I 
don't want to give the impression that I think a coupla beetles are 
harmless when obviously it's more than just a couple, and when it is 
demonsrable that the harm they can do is enormous. The thoughtless 
destruction of large tracts of forest, both in the developed and 
under-developed worlds, is unacceptable, and I hope that the Man of 
Steel's article, which provoked this debate in the first place, 
examines the greed that motivates such acts (sorry, but it hasn't 
appeared here in SA yet).


Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
 the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
 on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"